“Lost” Jobs interviews add dimension, perspective to his life story

Author Brent Schlender unearthed hours of audio of the late Apple co-founder.

If you made it through all 656 pages of Walter Isaacson's official biography of Steve Jobs, you might feel there's little more to add. However, author Brent Schlender (who covered Steve Jobs throughout his career for the Wall Street Journal and Fortune) may have more of Jobs's own words to expand an already sprawling story.

Schlender recently turned up three dozen tapes of interviews conducted with Jobs over the last 25 years. Some he said he never listened to, and some had never been transcribed. Put in the perspective of Jobs's death last October, Schlender said he didn't "fully appreciate the importance" of the time Jobs spent away from Apple, between 1985 and 1997.

"This middle period was the most pivotal of his life," Schlender wrote for Fast Company. "And perhaps the happiest. He finally settled down, married, and had a family. He learned the value of patience and the ability to feign it when he lost it. Most important, his work with the two companies he led during that time, NeXT and Pixar, turned him into the kind of man, and leader, who would spur Apple to unimaginable heights upon his return."

Schlender sprinkles interesting quotes from Jobs throughout his examination of this "wilderness" period in Jobs's life: his comparison of his management style to The Beatles, his insistence that good technology should be invisible to the end user, and a somewhat rare admission that his keen eye for the mass appeal of technology sometimes missed important innovations.

"At PARC, they had 200 computers networked using electronic mail and file servers," Jobs said in 1991. "It was an electronic community of collaboration that they used every day. I didn't see that because I was so excited about the graphical user interface. It's taken me, and to some extent the rest of the industry, a whole decade to finally start to address that second breakthrough—using computers for human collaboration rather than just as word processors and individual productivity tools."